I am not speaking for Microsoft here, so anyone who claims I am is subject to the utter moronic wingnut judgment for their lack of comprehension!

People love to complain about poor localization quality in software from Microsoft.

But if you think about it, other people talk about poor user interface and core product usability even before localization enters into the picture.

And it is really hard to separate the two.

But let's take that second point first and think about it.

Now if you ignore Microsoft Bob (as many in Microsoft like to do!) and that Windows Home Server book for a moment, the truth is that very little of the software produced by Microsoft has more than one user interface, despite the fact that there are definitely different levels of users in terms of knowledge of computers, experience, age, maturity, gender, and numerous other facets. So in the end the software may well be usable to some part of the audience (perhaps only geek developers with the same social skills as the original engineers, perhaps more!), and the usual problem being suggested is that it is not usable to some other segment of the audience, presumably (though not always) a wider audience.

This is easy enough to understand conceptually, and most of the buzz around Microsoft these days from UX people is about the usability, and those UX people have the job of trying to make the product usable by the biggest possible audience.

Some products are better at this than others. I do not know of a single person inside or outside of Microsoft who does not know of at least one negative example here, where a product kind of missed some chance to be considered usable in some error message or dialog or process or technique.

Sometimes that is a pure fault in the product, and other times it is a fault in this general idea of trying to average out the abilities of every single user even though every user is different and there is no way to have everybody find something 100% usable without giving different user interfaces for different groups (which most groups would find prohibitively expensive and even if they did not there is no generalized expertise around writing to such different audiences.

And so far such attempts to fix the problem suffer from the "expert mode" problems that Raymond Chen has spoken about in the past.

Plus there are only very limited mechanisms for "training wheels" that can be taken off for users who get more experienced and want to move into a different user interface experience.

Now when you add localization to the mix, you add additional dimensions to the problem:

  • A less usable product may be harder for the localizer to understand well enough to localize in the first place;
  • Standard glossaries are developed for terms that cannot account for the fact that different segments of a local market may prefer or even know different terms;
  • As the desire to widen markets increases, the effort to localize for those markets often does not (for example, Language Interface Packs and Windows Starter Edition share a great deal of their localized content, despite the fact that they really are aimed at different market segments;
  • Just as with the core product, there are limited mechanisms for "training wheels" that can be taken off for users who get more experienced and want to move into a different user interface experience.

At which point we get to the essence of the problem -- it is difficult to separate localization complaints that are indeed just purely due to bad localization and/or terminology versus those that are due to it just bring the wrong terns or the wrong interface or the wrong error message for a specific market segment.

The former problem, when it is discovered, can be treated as a pure localization bug, just as a core problem that affects localized platform can be treated as a pure localizability bug.

The fact that there are limited means to address the latter problem is kind of besides the point unless you really consider that this is completely the point. We need mechanism to address this problem.

Because this is the core problem related to localization quality that cannot be solved until after it is recognized and treated as a problem, and more effectively addressed from an engineering standpoint.

In a company and an industry that applauds ideas like Language Interface Packs due to how they make localization cheaper, I don't imagine that there are a whole lot of "Bill Gates" awards for people who make any language more expensive,even if the idea brilliantly solves the problem....

Know what I mean?

 

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